The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets (11 page)

None of
our friends tended to wax lyrical about Magna — they were too stuck up perhaps,
or too accustomed to being in beautiful houses. Inigo’s face softened when she
had finished her little speech.

‘You
must be Charlotte,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘Penelope was right, for once.

‘What
does that mean?’ Charlotte asked him.

‘Oh
nothing, nothing. Come on then, Penelope will show you upstairs and I’ll try to
keep the drawing room fractionally above freezing. No mean feat, I can tell
you.’

By the
time he had finished this sentence, he had spoken more to Charlotte than he had
spoken to anyone else I had ever invited home. He shot me a defiant look, as if
to say, You see! I can be nice to people when they merit it!

‘You’re
in the blue room, Charlotte,’ I said. ‘Shut up, Inigo, and show Harry where he’s
sleeping.’

The blue room was part of
the East Wing, at the far end of the corridor with a view of the chapel from
one window and Mamas ducks from the other. It was one of the few rooms in the
house that still looked reasonably presentable after the war — which is to say
that the ceiling wasn’t about to collapse, and the carpet hadn’t worn through
yet. Being a room stuck out on its own, it had been unused by the army, which
had saved it from the tramping of boots and the heavy presence of lingering
soldiers. It was haunted, of course, but that had never bothered me. I opened
my mouth to tell Charlotte about the way the windows rattled on the stillest of
summer afternoons, and shut it again. There was never any telling how people were
going to react to ghosts. said Charlotte, looking around. ‘Why is this the blue
room?’

It was
a fair question. The blue room was in fact wallpapered in faded pink and white
flowers that Mama had chosen shortly after she moved into Magna with Papa
before talk of war had even begun. It had been the first room in the house that
she had chosen to refurbish, and as it turned out it was the
only
room
that she was to redecorate before Papa left to fight and we moved to the Dower
House.

‘It was
blue in my grandparents’ day,’ I explained. ‘Mama tried to get us. calling it
the pink room, but of course that never stuck.’

Charlotte
hurried over to the window. ‘The snow,’ she breathed. ‘It’s not ever going to
stop.

Indeed
the snow did seem to be falling faster and faster; great silent flakes
careering down from a pale grey sky that pressed down on the house like a vast
pillow.

‘Isn’t
it lucky we got the early train? There’s no way we would have made it, had we
waited,’ she said, turning back to me, her green eyes shining.

It was
amazing how easy I felt with her, despite all my worrying. She was so utterly
familiar to me, like a character from a favourite book come to life. I joined
her by the window. The kitchen garden lay still under its white blanket, which
gave me an odd sense of freedom. Silently, I thanked God for giving me
temporary respite from the location I associated so strongly with the night my
parents met. Turning back to the room to check that Mary had dusted the chest
of drawers, I noticed with horror one of Lavinia’s mousetraps under the
dressing table. Mercifully minus
pauvre papa souris,
it was all set to
go with a piece of moulding Cheddar sitting as bait. Charlotte looked at me,
then followed my eyes down to the floor.

‘Oh,
mice are snidge!’ she said. ‘There’s no need for that in here.’

‘Snidge?’

Charlotte
grinned. ‘Sweet, of course. I never mind mice.’

‘It’s
my cousin. She thinks that they follow her, wherever she goes.

‘Nice
to think I’m not the only one with odd relations,’ said Charlotte, sitting down
on the bed. ‘Don’t mind Harry though, will you? He was so pleased to be asked
here.’

I
nearly pointed out that it was she who had asked him, but instead I just
smiled.

‘Where’s
your lovely mother?’ Charlotte asked, looking round as if she expected her to leap
out of the wardrobe.

‘Away
this weekend.’

‘Oh,
how disappointing. I was so looking forward to meeting her.’

‘She’s
gone to visit my godmother,’ I said.

‘How
strange, in this weather. Gosh, I feel exactly like Anna Karenina, don’t you?’

I
laughed and thought
please
don’t make me admit that I haven’t read that,
either.

‘This
is the most romantic house I’ve ever seen,’ she went on. ‘Oh! Do look, is that
a dovecote?’ (She pronounced it ‘doocut’, which Mama always used to insist was
the correct way to say it.)

‘Yes.
Actually, we call it the pigeon house. Mama adores anything with wings and
feathers. It was a twenty-first birthday present. Papa gave it to her.’

‘How
romantic!’ exclaimed Charlotte. She turned back into the room and scanned the
objects beside her bed. I had picked some winter roses for her. A scattering of
white petals had already fallen onto the table. She didn’t comment on the
flowers, reaching instead for
Good Housekeeping.

‘Ooh. “How
to be the perfect hostess”,’ she read. ‘I trust you’ve been studying this,
Penelope?’

I
blushed. I had. I changed the subject. ‘I bumped into your aunt the other day.’

‘She
said. In Selfridges, wasn’t it? Apparently you sent something flying and she
came to your rescue.

‘It was
quite funny, actually.’ I told her all about her buying the cricket cap for
Inigo.

‘How
typical,’ said Charlotte with a grin when I had finished the tale. ‘Never was
there anyone so unsuited to being poor as Aunt Clare. The sooner she remarries,
the better.’

I
couldn’t tell if she was joking. ‘Do you think she might?’

‘Possibly.
She has no shortage of admirers.’

Christopher,
for one, I thought.

‘I find
her impossible to fathom,’ Charlotte went on. ‘She’s so frightening sometimes;
she
thinks
like a man, you know. That’s perhaps what they like about
her, I suppose. Gosh, I hadn’t thought of that before.’ Charlotte frowned.

‘Mama
doesn’t understand money, either,’ I confessed. ‘She gets terribly worked up
about preserving energy and not using too much electricity, then she’ll whizz
up to London and spend a fortune in Dior.’

‘My
mother only spends other people’s money,’ said Charlotte. ‘She was out with the
conductor again last night. She’s got into the most hideous habit of
telephoning me every time she’s seen him to report on how they spent their
evening.’

‘And
how did they spend last night?’ I asked.

‘He
took her to Sheekey’s, lucky thing.’

‘Oh.’
What and where was Sheekey’s?

‘I
asked her what Mr Hollowman was conducting at the moment and she said, “Electricity,
darling”, which made me feel ill.’

I
laughed. ‘At least she’s enjoying herself. I worry for my mother. She seems so
lost
sometimes.’

‘At
least if she’s lost you know where she is,’ said Charlotte grimly. ‘My mother
never stays in one place for longer than three days at a time. Gosh, Penelope,
I must have a pee.’

The blue room had a poky
little bathroom with a small window, but the bath was ocean deep and long so
that you could stretch your legs right out and still not touch the end of it,
and that, in my view, made up for the tiny basin and yet more peeling pink
flowery wallpaper. Charlotte peered into the cracked looking-glass.

‘I look
like the captain of the lacrosse team,’ she said ruefully. ‘I used to be
captain of the lacrosse team,’ I said. ‘It’s a lethal game.’ I pulled my
cardigan off my right shoulder. ‘See?’

‘Oh,
Penelope, that’s horrible,’ cried Charlotte.

I
grinned. I liked showing people my scar. It wasn’t very big, but it was there
all right, and it had hurt like hell when Nora Henderson — an Amazon among
sixteen-year-old girls — had crashed the chipped wooden edge of her lacrosse
stick down on my shoulder.

‘I didn’t
have you down as the sporty type,’ said Charlotte. ‘As I said, it’s greatly to
my disadvantage that I didn’t go to boarding school. I think it would have done
me the world of good. Knocked off all my edges and all that. I’m just the type
who would have benefited from a bit of discipline on the playing fields.’

I
blinked. Charlotte said the oddest things. It was hard to know whether to laugh
or not. ‘I play a bit of tennis now, but not much else. Inigo and I used to
ride all the time,’ I said.

‘Ride?’
Charlotte looked as though she had never heard of the concept.

‘Horses.
Well, ponies really. Look, there’s Banjo.’ I pointed out of the window. Johns,
buoyed up with brandy, was leading my reluctant pony through the orchard
towards the stables. With the snow swirling around them, and Johns in his thick
overcoat and hat, they looked like something out of Thomas Hardy.

‘Isn’t
he sweet?’ cried Charlotte. ‘Can we go and give him an apple later? The horse,
I mean — not your man.

Not
likely, I thought, remembering Mary’s fruit salad. ‘Banjo’s a bit snappy with
people he doesn’t know,’ I said. ‘He took a chunk out of my great-aunt’s
twinset last spring.’

Charlotte
looked alarmed.

‘I must
change,’ I said, aware of my scruffiness.

‘Oh,
don’t worry about me,’ said Charlotte. ‘I’m always fine. ‘I absolutely believed
her.

On the way back to my
bedroom I passed the Wellington room where Harry was staying. I hesitated
outside the door, then panicked, thinking that he would have heard my footsteps
stopping, so decided to knock and check that he was settling in. He opened the
door, still wearing his coat.

‘Oh,
you poor thing. I know how cold it can get up here,’ I said. ‘I’ve got hot-water
bottles for us all, so you should survive the night.’ Why did he make me feel
so stupid? I only had to look at him and I felt about eleven years old.

‘Please
don’t worry. I don’t really feel the cold at all. I just like to
pretend
I
do to annoy my mother. It’s become something of a habit.’

I must
have looked confused. ‘Do you
like
annoying her?’ I asked him.

Harry
laughed. ‘I read somewhere that only very ordinary men adore their mothers.’

‘That’s
ridiculous.’

‘But
funnily enough, it’s true.’

‘I
thought your mother was wonderful.’

‘Of
course she is. But wonderful people nearly always combine their wonderfulness
with other characteristics that drive one utterly crazy.

I liked
the way he said ‘crazy’. He couldn’t completely pronounce his Rs and the echo
of a W sound hung there instead. Any more than the echo and it would have
sounded absurd, but as it happens it gave him a vulnerability, a humanness
under the magician’s cloak. He looked at me thoughtfully.

‘Can I
ask you something?’ he said.

‘Of
course.

‘Won’t
you come in?’ he asked, suddenly serious. I suppressed the urge to laugh out
loud.

‘Yes,
thank you,’ I said instead.

The
Wellington room suited a magician, being dark and spooky and filled with grisly
portraits of the most alarming of ancestors. In the corner of the room stood a
suit of armour that I was convinced I had seen perambulating around the nut
garden at midnight a few years ago. Normally, I would have housed a guest in
any room but this, yet in Harry’s case it seemed the perfect fit. He certainly
looked at home; his suitcase spilled heavy books, jazz records and ink-stained
pieces of writing paper onto the faded ochre and russet rug on the wooden
floor.

‘I hope
you like it in here,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of different.’

Harry
looked around in surprise.
‘Like
it? It’s like something out of a horror
film, only slightly more scary.’ He stretched a hand out to touch the bat’s
head carvings around the fireplace. ‘I love it,’ he added simply. “What
self-respecting magician wouldn’t?’

‘I’ve
always felt that any ghosts at Magna are pretty friendly, by and large,’ I
said, awkwardly. Harry pulled a packet of cigarettes apparently out of thin air
and sighed. There was something distinctly feminine about him, I decided,
though I was certain he’d be horrified if anyone ever told him so.

‘Do you
miss her terribly?’ I was amazed to hear myself asking. Oh help, I thought two
seconds later, I shouldn’t have asked that. Harry glared at me for a moment.

‘I don’t
like being without her,’ he said at last.

‘I’m
sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you. It’s none of my business.’

‘None
of mine any more,’ said Harry lightly. His glare had been replaced by that
steadfastly amused look once again so I ploughed on.

‘Do you
think her the most beautiful girl in the world?’

Harry
laughed this time. ‘Have you ever met her?’